The present invention relates to a document stacking apparatus wherein mechanically or electronically processed documents are taken into and retained within a storage bin.
Document processing equipment is well known in processing documents wherefrom information is automatically to be read. The document is moved along a track past processing equipment which performs the reading or printing operations required for the document. In general terms, a stack of documents is supplied to a feeder bin, ducted along the document path for processing and finally stored in a storage bin in an output stack.
The present invention relates most particularly to check encoders, where checks are supplied from a feeder stack and data is read from the check and also supplied to the check. Thereafter, the processed checks are sorted into different stacks for further processing.
With increasing mechanization of the check sorting process, it is desirable to put the checks through a sequence of processes using a sequence of machines. When the checks are placed in the output stack there is generally no alignment between the edges of the various checks in the stack. It is, therefore, very difficult to take the output stack of one machine and place it as the input stack to a further machine.
There is also a trend towards making the document track in a document encoder bi-directional. That is to say, the documents can be made to travel in two directions along the track and around different portions of the track to have their processing completed in a short physical distance, the checks or documents encountering different processing operations in each pass along the track. Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a document stacker where the documents are stored in a bin and can be removed from that bin in the reverse direction for further processing in the document encoding equipment.